Upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04

I'm a little embarrassed to say this but this is the first time I've upgraded from one version to another. In the past, I would always go the way of a fresh install, a nasty habit I picked up from my Windows days. Unfortunately, it's something I never managed to shake off. Until now, that is.

But with the new release of Jaunty Jackalope, I thought I'd give it a shot. I was already pretty happy with the settings on my laptop running Intrepid Ibex. An upgrade would save me the hassle of reconfiguring everything.

And you know what? The upgrade worked without any major hitches.

Alright, to be honest, I did have to tweak a couple of things (more on that later), but by and large, the upgrade went smoothly. I gotta hand it to the Ubuntu team, the design of the upgrade process is slick and easy.

There's two ways to do the upgrade: over the network through Synaptic, and through a local copy of the Alternate Installation disk. The difference only happens in the beginning. After the first few steps, they converge.

I tried the Synaptic network upgrade first, but decided to abort it on account of a slow network. Regardless, the process is almost idiot-proof. When you fire up Synaptic, you'll see a notice for the new version, alongside an Upgrade button.

What follows next is additional info.


Then, Ubuntu downloads the two files which consist the upgrade tool. The files are relatively small and the download finished quickly.



At this point, the network upgrade and the CD-ROM upgrade now converge. I did let the network upgrade run a bit until I realized it was a Bad Idea. I cancelled the operation, and Ubuntu rolled back to 8.10.

I then decided to download the Alternate Install CD. Once done, I mounted it locally via

sudo mount -o loop /home/dodgie/Desktop/ubuntu-9.04-alternate-i386.iso /media/cdrom0/

On the root of the Alternate Install CD is an executable called cdromupgrade. Invoking the program:

gksu ./cdromupgrade

And it brought me back to the point which you see now. The rest of the pictures are pretty much self-explanatory. Not much more to do except just to answer a couple of prompts.

My next post will be about the minor hiccups I mentioned earlier. Even those could not dampen my enthusiasm for the breezy process.

Ubuntu rocks!

Jaunty reviews

A couple of reviews of Ubuntu 9.04:

• LifeHacker: First Look at Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope


• cnet: Ubuntu 9.04 as slick as Windows 7, Mac OS X

Jaunty, at last

My first look at the final release of Ubuntu 9.04, a.k.a., Jaunty Jackalope. Is it an eye test or am I just not seeing the jackalope in there? Kidding aside, it must be a new direction towards a less whimsical and more professional-looking desktop. But truth be told, thus far I like Intrepid Ibex's best.



Not too many changes on the shipped applications or user interface. It's really the same set of applications we've seen in the past few releases. On the one hand, it's a sign of stability; and on the other, dare I say that Ubuntu is becoming...boring?

The few tweaks that there are happened in the System->Administration menu. A new application, Computer Janitor, has been added.


Computer Janitor is supposed to clean up unnecessary files. That's the description on its About page, anyway. While it's a welcome addition, it doesn't look to be anything earthshaking.



Finally, here's a minor change in the installation process.



It's too early to tell what the performance bump is on Jaunty Jackalope. I'll know in a few days after I upgrade my laptop. Till then, a cautious "Well done!" to the Ubuntu team for releasing the new version on schedule.

Jaunty Jackalope countdown banners

You can get more countdown banners.

Jaunty goes into Beta

Jaunty has gone into beta release as of March 25. The scheduled release date is April 23.

Haven't had the chance to download the beta ISO, but possibly next week. In the meantime, here's a quick review of the product.

More Jaunty Jackalope

Still playing around with Jaunty on a VirtualBox virtual machine. Something quite bad has happened: I was able to install the VBoxAdditions to my guest OS, but on reboot it warned me that Ubuntu was running on low-resolution mode, and would I like to reconfigure. But whatever I answered, it kept barfing with the following message.

I suppose for now I'll have to chalk this up to the Alpha level of the version I'm trying. Anyway, it did revert back to the pre-VBoxAdditions setup after a little while.

A few more things...


As I wrote previously, ext3 is still the default file system, but you can now choose ext4. The Ubuntu folks say they might make ext4 the default with Jaunty+1.


This looks to be the new default login theme for Ubuntu. I like it. I hope the rest of the desktop theme follows the look.


OpenOffice.org v3.0 for Jaunty.

One of the other new things I saw, but for which I failed to take a snapshot, was the new style of the notification popup. I don't see the significance but it seems important enough that Mark Shuttleworth has a video of it.

More to follow.

Jaunty Jackalope: New timezone selection screen

I am in the process of installing a pre-release version of Jaunty Jackalope on a virtual machine. There's few significantly new developments at this point that bear remark, except perhaps for the new timezone selection screen pictured above.

This pre-release version still uses the Intrepid background theme. I was expecting the default file system to be ext4, but apparently, it still uses ext3 under a standard installation.

More to follow in a little while.

New Ubuntu options

While poking around in the Jaunty Jackalope download page, I noticed several new additions to the usual download options. For the past few releases, we've only had to contend with the Desktop Install, the Server Install, and the Alternate Install Edition, all with the 32-bit and 64-bit variants. These all fell within the 700MB size limit of CD-Rs. But with Jaunty Jackalope, there are a few more:

First, there's now the Install/Live DVD, which weighs in at 4.3GB. There's no stated differences with the standard CD edition, but I presume that this will have more packages preloaded into the CD, e.g., compilers, development environments, and databases. The bigger size will be a pain to download, but it should be easier to redistribute the software to organizations without broadband Internet.

Next, there's the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, available as a .img file. As per the description:

This USB image allows you to run Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) from a USB storage device without installing UNR on your computer. While running in this "live" environment you will be running a full desktop environment and have the option to install UNR permanently, as well as installing UNR alongside an existing operating system. This USB image is optimized for netbooks with screens up to 10". You will need at least 256MB of RAM to install from this image.

For almost all PCs. This includes most machines with Intel/AMD/etc type processors and almost all computers that run Microsoft Windows, as well as newer Apple Macintosh systems based on Intel processors. Choose this if you are at all unsure.

Finally, there's the MID USB image, meant for mobile Internet devices, also available as a .img file.

The MID USB image allows you to try Ubuntu without changing your computer at all, and at your option to install it permanently later. This USB image is optimized for handheld devices with 4-7" touchscreens and limited processing power. You will need at least 128MB of RAM to install from this image.

Now I wish I knew which MID devices Ubuntu runs on so I can go out and buy 'em!

Image files are written to USB using the usb-imagewriter utility, as outlined in the USB image how-to.

Curious at these developments, I also had a look at the Intrepid and Hardy download pages. The Netbook remix had also been introduced to 8.10, but with 8.04, only the DVD option is now available.

Jaunty Jackalope: ext4

April is just around the corner, and that means that it's almost time for the next release of Ubuntu. This time it'll be Ubuntu 9.04, code-named Jaunty Jackalope. Worth upgrading to? I was just about to write a shor post on that until I realized I already did something similar last year. So upgrade or not as you will. As for me, I'll probably get around to it in May, June, or July, depending on the circumstances.

What's to expect for Jaunty? Possibly the most significant change is the introduction of ext4, the successor to the ext3. ext4 is notable for its larger disk capacity, up to 1 exabyte now, with file sizes up to 16 terabytes. In addition, it breaks the 32,000-subdirectory limit present in ext3. I doubt I'll be breaking those figures anytime soon, but I suppose the large database people will be excited about this. In any case, ext4 is backwards-compatible with ext3, so no problem there. More on ext4.